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RE: Gridcoin GPU mining (6): Obtaining the maximum performance out of your GPUs
Thank you, @jimbo88 and welcome to BOINC and Gridcoin!
Asteroids@home is a bit of a cypher to me. Supposedly, it's also a FP64 project (like MilkyWay@home) but their top hosts list doesn't seem to reflect that (powerful CPUs are the best crunchers, not GPUs). It's likely that their GPU application is also CPU-bound, so freeing up a CPU core should help to boost GPU performance.
GTX 660M is a mobile GPU and those are usually severely restricted in performance - it's unlikely that running multiple tasks on it would yield any benefits. I wish I could be more specific, but Asteroids@home supports only Nvidia GPUs, so I have never crunched for them (having only AMD GPUs in my machines).
Hi, thanks for the welcome!
Yes, I'm currently using a gaming laptop for BOINC/GCR. Per the wiki, my 660M is pretty poor (730 GFLOPS).
I picked asteroids@home due to the fact that it was listed on gridcoin.us as "nvidia gpu", while all the other GPU projects were filed under the "multiple gpu" header, which I (mis?)interpreted to mean ">1 GPU", instead of "supports multiple varieties of gpus".
Since reading your post, it seems the most important factor is the FP32 vs FP64 distinction. I think I'll try out some other GPU projects on the list to find out which work best with what I've got.
You are right. Fortunately, there are only three BOINC projects requiring FP64: MilkyWay, Asteroids (not 100% sure) and PrimeGrid (only for some tasks). There might be some others that I am unaware of.
And of course, Asteroids is listed as Nvidia GPU project because it supports only CUDA. "Multi GPU" means that listed projects support both AMD and Nvidia (through OpenCL). But I admit it sounds ambiguous to new users, we have to change that. I'll point it out to our webmaster.
I began running Einstein last night and I'm seeing some big differences (of course, I'll have to be patient to see what my eventual GCR magnitude will be):
It's automatically using my gpu, cpu, AND the intel hd graphics (I didn't know this was useful in any way to BOINC, as no other prior project I've run had used it). It seems to fully use all of my resources, so I dropped my cpu-only (pogs skynet) project as well.
My machine is running much hotter (aka being used more fully?) with Einstein, so much so, that I had to scale back the up-time option. It was >100C (the specs of my cpu have a max temp of 105C) and shortly later, I found that it had shut itself down, which I found comforting because that means the safety systems are fully functional. This is a great development in my opinion: I'm figuring out the capability of my (limited) hardware, and it's the first time I've ever been able to hear my fan run, which means I'm actually putting it to work!
Regarding your comment on ambiguity: I believe it's only ambiguous to those of us that are both (a) new, and (b) reside on the left-hand side of the computer literacy bell curve. I've only been a BOINC user for 2 weeks and a Gridcoin user for about 10 days. I learned what a GPU was two weeks ago, so confusion is to be expected.
Although, it might be helpful to expand the setup instructions a little in regards to choosing a GPU project. Maybe something as simple as mentioning the FP32 vs FP64 distinction and linking to this blog post.
If you check the list of Einstein@home applications, you will see that they support opencl-intel_gpu (and lots of other hardware). Every BOINC project has such a list of applications - with one glance, you can immediately assess project's computing capabilites.
Heat output is a often a good indication on how much computing is actually being done. Of course, laptops are usually cramped and thermally challenged and not really designed for intensive and continuous CPU and GPU workloads. Running it at 100 °C for prolonged period of time will shorten its lifespan. But even if you find out that BOINC is stressing your laptop too hard, you can still help Gridcoin just by running Gridcoin Wallet (it helps to secure the network). Also, holding Gridcoin in your Wallet pays an annual 1.5% interest compounded whenever you stake, even if you don't have BOINC installed at all (so called Proof-of-Stake mechanism).